Mitt camp explains fuzzy energy math

Mitt Romney culled statistics from a small subset of loan guarantee recipients to come up with his claim Wednesday night that “about half” of the renewable energy companies backed by the Obama administration “have gone out of business.”

As POLITICO and other fact-checkers quickly pointed out, Romney’s numbers from the first presidential debate are not correct. Not even close.

Story Continued Below

On Thursday morning, the Romney campaign said the former Massachusetts governor was referring only to the first seven green energy companies to get loan guarantees from one Energy Department program in 2009 and 2010. Three of them — including the solar company Solyndra — have since filed for bankruptcy, and “a fourth is on the verge,” a Romney campaign aide said by email.

Romney’s stats didn’t include the 19 companies that later received loan guarantees under the same program. None of them went bankrupt, and some are even thriving.

The three bankruptcies amounted to 12 percent of the total 26 companies — far less than half.

Asked why Romney was basing his statistics on just the first two years of the program, the campaign aide said: “It takes time for a company to go bankrupt after you give them hundreds of millions of dollars. So saying that a company that received a loan guarantee a year ago has not failed yet is pretty much meaningless.”

“Gov. Romney was correct that President Obama spent $90 billion of stimulus on green energy and that many of the businesses have gone out of business,” the aide said in an email. “When he then said 'I think about half of them, of the ones have been invested in, they’ve gone out of business,' he was referring specifically to the 1705 loan guarantee program that President Obama created in the stimulus and used to fund Solyndra. That program funded seven companies in its first two years, of which three have gone bankrupt and a fourth is on the verge.”

The highest-profile Section 1705 recipient to go under is Solyndra, which received a $535 million loan guarantee. The solar company filed for bankruptcy and laid off workers in September 2011, fueling a political firestorm in Washington.

Energy storage company Beacon Power also went bankrupt in 2011 after receiving a $43 million loan guarantee to help build an energy storage plant in Stephentown, N.Y. But the company was acquired by Rockland Capital in February under an agreement that ensures DOE recovers 70 percent of the loan guarantee.